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A Math Lesson From Hitler’s Germany (2017)
In the 1930s, prejudice and anti-science ideology destroyed the world’s leading math department, at Göttingen. It couldn't happen here, could it?
From Princeton and Columbia to Berkeley and Stanford, it’s hard to find a great math department in the United States that was not shaped in part by European mathematicians who came to or stayed in the U.S. because of the Nazis. “In some sense every scholar is at risk,” says Robbert Dijkgraaf, the current director of the Institute for Advanced Study, which attracted many of the scientists and mathematicians who fled Göttingen and other German universities in the 1930s. “It’s not so much that people are persecuted because of their beliefs, but there is a certain trend where careful reasoning, the search for truth, all the delicacies of having a balanced point of view, acting on facts, being honest about what you do and don’t know, your uncertainty, all these values we have in science and scholarship are at risk.”
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